Managing multiple versions of a document in a single user or a multiple user environment is a desired feature that provides a coarse level of revision control. A user can retrieve an earlier version of a document in its entirety and restore the current version of the document to the previous version of the document. Structured documents can be stored with tagged objects including timestamps that can prove valuable in searching for previous versions of documents.
Frequently, a user can seek to retrieve only a portion of a document. Partial document restoration can provide an efficient method by which objects can be searched and retrieved to modify or add the previous version of an object to a current version of a document. Particularly, when multiple users modify an individual document, no single previous version can correspond to a version that a user can seek to restore the entire document. Rather only a portion of the document can be modified by the user (while another user can modify a separate portion of the document), and the user can seek to retrieve a version for only one portion of a document rather than the previous version of the document in its entirety. Network (cloud) based storage of documents have increased the ease of access to retrieve, edit and update documents by multiple users. Some applications can also allow simultaneous editing of documents by multiple users, and a method for partial document restoration can improve a user's experience by allowing editing on separate sections of documents without a requirement to “lock out” individual sections among users. Thus, there exists a need for a method to permit version control of documents with a graphical user interface to display and retrieve individual portions of a document that are less than a document in its entirety.